Books: Yaddo and Substance

One summer day in 1899, a private banker named Spencer Trask and his wife
Katrina were walking through the expensive wildwood of their big country
estate, Yaddo, at Saratoga Springs, N. Y. Suddenly Katrina stopped, listened,
raised her hands "as if in appeal to that Something which was too vast for me to
define." Few moments later she said with dreamy excitement: "Here will be a
perpetual series of house partiesof literary men, literary women,
and other artists. . . . At Yaddo they will find the Sacred Fire, and
light their torches...